10 Cool Things Science Taught Us About Dogs This Year

The year of 2017 brought us new discoveries and scientific reports. Luckily for dog owners, not all researched are dedicated to nuclear physics: sometimes dogs become the object of study.

Below you will find a list of new facts about dogs that scientists revealed in 2017–18. Do you still think you cannot teach your 10-year old terrier new tricks? Read on!

1. Scientists claim they have found proofs that older dogs can learns new tricks and do it even better than younger dogs! In the course of the research involving 95 Border Collies aged between five months to thirteen years old, the dogs had to choose the right picture on a touch screen to get a treat. Older dogs succeeded and even outperformed younger collies.

2. Dogs help reduce stress in families in which there is an autistic child. The stress level in such families was evaluated twice, with a time gap of 2.5 years. The researches found that dogs both caused short term stress reduction and continued reducing the stress level even at the end of the study. Actually, it can also mean that having a dog is beneficial for any kind of families.

3. If a dog finds that a person is angry, it is less likely to respond to instructions promptly. According to a recent research, when a person was instructing the dog on how to find a treat in the room and smiling or being neutral, the dog would respond very fast, whereas angry facial expressions and intonations made the dog hesitate.

4. Using the Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology, researchers figured out that vocal praise is as liked by dogs as treats. The majority of dogs involved in the experiment (13 out of 15, to be exact) responded similarly when they were given a hotdog after training or were praised verbally.